Friday, March 31, 2006

Across Antonioni’s filmmaking, there is a recurrent moment of perception that may allow us to reflect on an emergent imagination after cinematic images. I believe that Gilles Deleuze touches on the potential of these perceptive moments when he considers Antonioni’s filmmaking in terms of what he calls “any-space-whatever” and Op and Son images in his *Cinema 2*:

"As for the distinction between subjective and objective, it also tends to lose its importance, to the extent that the optical situation or visual description replaces the motor action. We run in fact into a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer a place to ask. It is as if the real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each were being reflected around the other, around a point of indiscernibility."

The scenes of “any-space-whatever” that most interest me in Antonioni’s films, and which I would like to appropriate for this project, are ones construed too easily as hysterical. Beyond a clinical or “common sense” diagnosis of hysteria, the bodies of many of Antonioni’s most significant characters may be telling of a condition of psychic-bodily dissociation related to our present post-cinematic condition. What is sense and where is it located in space when the image one has of bodies related in space is elsewhere: withdrawn, discoordinated, psychastheniac (Roger Caillois)?

Continually this is the question I ask myself watching Antonioni’s films until his post-’68 work, Zabriskie Point (1970). Curious as a film after American counter-culture and social movements in the late-60’s (and not so different than any numbers of films in this regard: Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park, etc.), Zabriskie is of particular interest to me as it presents a clairvoyant and senseless imagination in the face of social despair and political-judicial distopia -- the “states of exception” of the late-60’s/early-70’s American polis and a “globalizing” polis now.

Like any number of Antonioni characters, the female protagonist of Zabriskie puts the viewer into an ambivalent situation of perception, a point of indiscernibility (Delueze), in the final scene of the film: is she a terrorist in actuality, or does she only imagine the detonation of a bomb at the hotel? How does this scene form a mirror for the perceptive lapse earlier in the film that forces the viewer to adjudicate whether the male protagonist has in fact shot a police officer or if he is merely a hapless innocent? Moving from a meditation on such images shall we consider particular tactics for revolutionary violence not in terms of sensory-motor coordination achieved in purposive movement, but in terms of an eidetic imagination imminently destructive in virtuality *and* reality inasmuch as the real is increasingly determined by the virtual? If this project risks creating a critical fiction it does so only to mobilize factuality towards a new situation of demonstration and thought we currently bear witness to in the wake of “Terror” and other geopolitical quilting points.

To come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part. . . . Gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise: what wings raised to the second power can make things come down without weight? – Simone Weil

A pleasure to work The stutter The very veil of gravity Do not fail me Now these Second wings Work is a pleasure To lovely Innocents

Work is a pleasure Blue work No separate Love Of video monitor How we really Talk beauty To make money To make movies

To make money The way we move Blue collar blue Of virgin pleasure Huppert with Hair cropped The other Like Falconetti When is the face free Of this feeling When of this Pain second Wings to stutter Of Weil verily

Moon bluish-white When will we Descend from Lofty denials From ascetic skill Monitors of Bourgeois pleasure Work is pleasure Don’t distinguish Work from pain or love

To make money To circulate power Of this desperate snow desperate winter Of this monitor Design alights Promising DelacroixSuch wings

The working sing truly Arise to descend On second wings The working The unworking Sing truly Will beyond will Blowing harmonicas The beginnings of sing

Our pleasure to work Beginning with This poverty of love The fullness of love Pleasures of debt Blue makes everything Seen and soonHeard in this whistling Track this harmonic noon Heard by this harmonic blue Difference between boss And worker Difference between Factory and tv

Matters of these second wings Descend arise Point to pleasures of sky Sky blue with no one trail Noon shaped by silhouette

And love why are we Separate And why don’t we turn Why do we Still work In this factory Do we still love The sight Of paint as it lights up?

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Currently I am trying to take WHOF off blogger.com. I am doing this out of want to not support a corporate site such as blogger, as well as to organize the blog more effectively. Here are two prototype images for the new weblog-site: